Well, I was comparing that period to Disintegration. Disintegration is a record where all but three song are close to five minutes if not longer. Four of the songs are over seven minutes, the longest is nine and a half minute. Compare that to Kiss Me where there are five songs that are almost 5 minutes. On Head On The Door only one song is almost five minutes.
This kind of highlights what I mean by more straight forward. They'd done what they'd done on Disintegration before on a few songs, though apart from One More Time from Kiss Me, Sinking from Head on the Door and Cold from Porn the songs most similiar to this approach is from Faith with All Cats Are Gray, Funeral Party and Faith. Faith was also an album with a generally more slow, atmospheric sound than most of their other work in the 80's, apart from Disintegration.
On Disintegration every other song had a two and a half minute intro, with lush, drawn out string arrangements. That's something they (as shown) did really sparsley earlier on, instead favoring a faster, more straight forward approach. The primitive comes from the sound in their more desperate numbers (All I Want, Shake Dog Shake, Pornography minus Siamese Twin, Cold and A Strange Day, you know, those songs). Primitive is probably not a very fitting word though (it doesn't really apply to any Head on the Door songs, for instance). But I still mainain that they had a more straight forward sound in between Faith and Disintegration (with Pornography the least straight forward album of the ones in between).
Übereil